Plane Hamiltonian Cycles in Convex Drawings
This solves a long-standing open problem in graph drawing theory for a broad subclass, advancing the understanding of non-crossing substructures in geometric graphs.
The paper tackles Rafla's conjecture on plane Hamiltonian cycles in simple drawings of complete graphs by proving it for convex drawings, showing that every convex drawing of K_n contains a plane Hamiltonian cycle, Hamiltonian connectivity, and pancyclicity.
A conjecture by Rafla from 1988 asserts that every simple drawing of the complete graph $K_n$ admits a plane Hamiltonian cycle. It turned out that already the existence of much simpler non-crossing substructures in such drawings is hard to prove. Recent progress was made by Aichholzer et al. and by Suk and Zeng who proved the existence of a plane path of length $Ω(\log n / \log \log n)$ and of a plane matching of size $Ω(n^{1/2})$ in every simple drawing of $K_n$. Instead of studying simpler substructures, we prove Rafla's conjecture for the subclass of convex drawings, the most general class in the convexity hierarchy introduced by Arroyo et al. Moreover, we show that every convex drawing of $K_n$ contains a plane Hamiltonian path between each pair of vertices (Hamiltonian connectivity) and a plane $k$-cycle for each $3 \leq k \leq n$ (pancyclicity), and present further results on maximal plane subdrawings.